Found an interesting post at BlogMaverick. Mark discusses whether OpenSocial can compete with FaceBook API. At the moment OpenSocial is unified API for participating online social networks that allows developer to write applications that would work across the board, ie on all participating platforms. Facebook however has its own API, and is not part of the OpenSocial group.

Whether this is good or bad time will show.

Mark argues that Facebook stands above other social networks because it enforces real identities:

When you go to my Facebook profile, you get the real me. Thats not to say I answer every profile question. I don’t. I’m not going to disclose everything about myself. However, the data that is available about me is the most comprehensive, self maintained database record about me on the internet or probably anywhere. Access to that information times the however many tens of millions of Facebook active users is worth a lot of money.

As a consequence the information about users is so much more valuable, especially if combined with search engines:

So back to Yahoo and the Facebook API. I thought that if you put the 2 together, enabling Yahoo to access the Facebook database of users within the current API constraints, Yahoo search and ad serving would improve considerably. Expand the Facebook database with an opt in option to add further personal data that could be used FROM WITHIN THE YAHOO WEBSITE, the results for Yahoo could be extraordinary. A Yahoo searchbox within Facebook , or a search from a Yahoo site that recognizes you are the owner of a Facebook profile and customizes the results according to information culled from your profile would be incredibly powerful.

In order for this to happen Facebook needs to open their API, so the application could exist outside the Facebook domain.

Tim O’Reily has made some valid observations on his blog, yet I’d like to disagree with some of them:

A framework and a set of Google Gadgets for building “social applications” misses the point. We don’t want to build more applications that look like Facebook applications. It isn’t about a social UI. It’s about deeper re-use of social data to enliven any application.

I personally think that these two (reusing social data and developing more applications to improve that data) are equally important. Moreover, extracting social data for use in searches and other activities might bring some security issues and put off those concerned about privacy.

To summarise I see tree problem areas here:

• Centralised location to control user profile data
• Access to social data /read/
• Access to social platform /write/

All these three should be addressed separately. I guess Google is doing well with OpenSocial on the third, whereas social profile aggregator sites are targeting the first. Second one is rather tricky, because it touches very sensitive area of privacy.